A randomized, two‑year Finnish basic income experiment (2017–2019) assigned a substantial group of unemployed adults to receive an unconditional basic income (BI). The central question: can a social policy reduce the link between low income and low turnout by changing how recipients experience the welfare state?
This study asks whether policy implementation creates political feedback not only for direct beneficiaries but also for the "policy adjacent" — residents who live near a project but are not its direct recipients. Using a unique, geographically precise case, the analysis identifies how nearby affordable housing systematically shifts neighboring opinions.
This paper asks whether expanding pension benefits increases political participation among retirees, testing policy feedback and habit-formation theories with a causal design. The authors leverage a large pension reform in Illinois that raised benefits and use a regression discontinuity approach on administrative records to estimate turnout effects among retired public employees across multiple elections.
Do transgender and gender-diverse (TGD) people in the United States disproportionately encounter problems when trying to vote, and how do state policies about identity documents shape those experiences? Potential barriers include mismatches between official records and the names, gender markers, and gender expressions that TGD people use. State rules that govern updating gender markers on IDs and how IDs must be presented at the polls may either alleviate or worsen those difficulties.
This paper asks whether local government policy priorities shape women’s decisions to run for office and offers evidence on how municipal spending patterns relate to women’s emergence as candidates. Using Brazilian municipal-level variation, the authors link policy outputs and communal spending to the number and composition of entrants, arguing that women’s interest in running varies across place and time rather than being uniform.
The authors ask whether distinct state actions—learning demands, compliance demands, and sanctions—affect how citizens perceive welfare policy, beneficiaries, and the administering agency. Using a factorial survey experiment framed around German unemployment benefits, the study aims to distinguish which kinds of administrative burdens produce shifts in policy support, spending expectations, and legitimacy judgments. The piece contributes by unpacking heterogeneous policy-feedback effects across conceptually different state actions rather than treating administrative burden as a single phenomenon.
States have long been treated as “laboratories of democracy,” where learning and competition spread policy innovations. Building on policy feedback scholarship, this article develops a new framework of policy interdependence showing that state policies do more than teach or compete—they reshape interest-group politics across state lines.
This study asks whether local state action—specifically women’s police stations (WPS)—shapes citizens’ attitudes toward gender-based violence. Using evidence from Brazil, the authors examine whether the existence and duration of WPS in a municipality are associated with men’s rejection of violence and support for bystander intervention, and assess alternative explanations for those associations.
Scholarship often treats American government visibility as a single phenomenon, but this misses how it differs across racial groups. This gap between state submergence and conspicuousness in racial politics is addressed by examining why policy visibility varies among racial groups.
Public opinion exerts varied influences on welfare state policy preferences across OECD countries. This article moves beyond binary perspectives by proposing a nuanced typology distinguishing between accelerating, self-reinforcing, and self-undermining feedback mechanisms.
New research reveals a strategy where political actors engineer policies to weaken opponents. Focusing on conservative advocacy against public sector unions, the Conservative network-backed legislation resulted in significant declines in union density and revenue across states. This weakening of unions had consequences for public participation by diminishing their collective power.
Scholarship exploring policy feedback—the idea that government policies influence political behavior—often finds contradictory results regarding the Affordable Care Act (ACA). This study examines why these variations occur, highlighting three key insights. First, while ACA does shape politics through feedback effects, factors like partisan alignment and public trust can sometimes offset this impact. Second, how citizens respond depends on their motivation: some focus on self-interest when evaluating policies; others consider broader societal benefits.
A new field experiment suggests coproducing public services can amplify political voice among underrepresented citizens. Involving ethnic minority parents in their children's education increased the likelihood they would share policy preferences with politicians during citizen surveys, though it did not affect voting rates. The study found this effect was stronger for nonvoters than registered voters.
This study examines state-level collective bargaining policies and their impact on public sector labor unions.